The reunion was held at Ashland College. I have no idea why. Maybe it was affordable.

I’d missed the five year reunion. I was in Dover, DE, still in the Air Force.

I’m trying to remember things about the reunion. Mary was pregnant with Zach. Bonne Black Kelly was pregnant with her first son as well. (Bonne didn’t make it to the reunion but I thought I’d throw that in for trivia’s sake.)

The person I remember the best for being there was Sue Channel. I’d remembered Sue from high school. I never expected she’d remember me.

Sue saw me, ran to me, threw her arms around me and gave me a long, deep kiss. As she broke away, she said, “You haven’t changed at all.”

Uh, well, ah, I don’t know what was going on there. Sue wasn’t the only obviously “happy” people in the place, but what prompted her to give me that kiss is beyond me. I don’t remember her ever giving me a second look back at Cloverleaf.

That led me to ponder the makeup of society back in high school. No one out there reading this can deny that high school is a caste society. At Cloverleaf I remember the Jocks, the Rednecks, the “Bad Element”, the Nerds. Many of those groups had sub-groups. It always seemed to me that the girls who dated the Jocks were further divided into the Seville Girls, the Leroy Girls (later renamed the Westfield Center Girls), the Lodi Girls and the Chippewa Girls.

That division by town ran pretty deep. It made sense, given most of these folks went to elementary and junior high school together before getting dumped into one Cloverleaf High School.

Of course, Chippewa was a separate group on it’s own. They went to school with the Leroy kids for the most part, but lived too many cornfields away to be part of the group.

I moved in from Brunswick, so I didn’t fall into any of the geographic groups well. Somehow I managed to float among the groups pretty well. I was one of the smart kids, so I got along with the Nerds. Due to some of my habits, I got along with the “Bad Element”. The jocks? Well, the class of 71’s jocks and I got along well enough. The Rednecks? Not so well. On the other hand, they did share their beer with me, if you call throwing beer cans at me as they drove by sharing. Hey, the full ones that didn’t hit me were refreshing as I walked down Lake Road towards Medina.

But back to the Reunion.

I had a great time there. Everyone there was happy to see each other. The “bad girls” were having a hell of a good time. They were incredibly happy to hear about the “good girls” that got knocked up after high school. Not one of them had been.